Just about every town you pass through by bus in the Yucatan has something being cooked around the central plaza: pollo asado (grilled chicken), a taco truck, maybe just a sandwich cart. This was not the case in the small village of Ek Balam. This tiny village hasn’t seen a bus in probably ever. It has however seen 3 small hotels pop up amidst its 2 convenience stores, stray dogs, goats and turkeys roaming on the central plaza.
We don’t like to eat at hotels very much though, even if it’s lunchtime and we are hungry. Fortunately, peaking behind one of the convenience stores, we saw meat being weighed in the back yard. We wandered into the store to buy some iced tea leading the owner to ask us “Comida?”. In the back room of the store, there’s a wooden table and two stools about 1 foot off the ground. A luke-warm bowl of beans comes out, delicious thick hand-made tortillas, and piles of chicharron oozing with fat. It was at this point we realized this might not be the healthiest option (weight-wise or sanitation-wise).
We weren’t alone though. A couple from Merida arrives while we’re sitting and after a discussion about what’s available, two more stools appear. Another stack of tortillas, bowls of beans and fried pork fat and skin gets added to the already-crowded table. Judging from the giggles, the city-slicker couple are clearly as out-of-place as we are. After a lot of Spanish practice, we are biking to the nearby ruins with Arnando and Isabel and spend the afternoon clambering over old buildings and talking about what Arnando’s grandfather used to eat as a child based on what was available at the ruins: fried iguanas and flour made from the wild nut trees.
His grandfather probably had a tougher stomach than us though. The next morning and afternoon we pay for our meal and afternoon with prolonged stomach distress. There had to be a downside.
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